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Returning the (faceted) gaze: Reflections on representation, meaning and form
Get PDFThis brief position paper is the central narrative in a theoretic-historical triptych. The first two documents: A (Faceted) Semantic Web? (La Barre, 2011) and Traditions of Facet Theory or a Garden of Forking Paths? (La Barre, forthcoming) amplify a question Brian Vickery posed to the author in 2005. The current proposal, deeply entwined in the same narrative, seeks to continue the agenda of articulation
for a primarily North American audience. Instead of description and comparison, a starkly different analytical framework – Walter Benjamin’s notion of ‘aura’ – is deployed to interrogate facet theory along the core dimensions of tradition, uniqueness, and authenticity. The final aspect of this proposal will be an investigation of the aesthetic of redemption that may well serve as the bedrock for operational definitions and functional requirements for facet theory
The KO roots of Taylor’s Value-Added Model
Get PDFThe model developed by Bob Taylor for his book Value-Added Processes in Information Systems (1986) has been highly influential in the field of library and information science. Yet despite its impact on the broader field, the potential of the Value-Added Model has gone largely unexplored by knowledge organization researchers. Unraveling the history behind Taylor’s development of the model highlights the significant role played by professional indexers. The Value-Added Model is thus reexamined for its potential as a flexible framework for evaluating knowledge organization systems
Was there an Austroasiatic Presence in Island Southeast Asia prior to the Austronesian Expansion?
Get PDFNo Austroasiatic languages are spoken in island SE Asia today, although we know from the Chamic languages of Vietnam and the SA Huynh culture that contact was extensive between the mainland and the islands. However, the diversity of Neolithic materials in various island sites has led some archaeologists to question the Austronesian ‘Neolithic package’ model, without advancing a positive alternative. This paper suggests that Austroasiatic speakers had reached the islands of SE Asia (Borneo?) prior to the AB expansion and that this can be detected in both the archaeology, the languages and the synchronic material culture. The paper will focus in part on the transfer of taro cultivation as part of this process
The Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy and its Antithesis
Get PDFThe now taken-for-granted notion that data lead to information, which leads to knowledge, which in turn leads to wisdom was first specified in detail by R. L. Ackoff in 1988. The Data-Information-KnowledgeWisdom hierarchy is based on filtration, reduction, and transformation. Besides being causal and hierarchical, the scheme is pyramidal, in that data are plentiful while wisdom is almost nonexistent. Ackoff’s formula linking these terms together this way permits us to ask what the opposite of knowledge is and whether analogous principles of hierarchy, process, and pyramiding apply to it. The inversion of the DataInformation-Knowledge-Wisdom hierarchy produces a series of opposing terms (including misinformation, error, ignorance, and stupidity) but not exactly a chain or a pyramid. Examining the connections between these phenomena contributes to our understanding of the contours and limits of knowledge
Exploring classification as conversation
Get PDFConversations are proposed as a useful lens through which to consider knowledge-organizing behaviors. Human conversations are sites of knowledge creation, where participants communicate to establish meaning that is contextual and shared. The conversations generated in collaborative online environments offer new opportunities to observe, not only how knowledge is created, but also how users participate in various knowledge-organizing activities. In a Web environment pervaded by conversational forms – social classification systems, blogs, and wikis – participatory knowledge organization is an emerging phenomenon that warrants further exploration. Other areas for research are suggested, including the potential promise to leverage participatory knowledge organization into future applications and developments of Web functionality
Tagging for health information organisation and retrieval
Get PDFThis paper examines the tagging practices evident on CiteULike, a research oriented social bookmarking site for journal articles. Articles selected for this study were health information and medicine related. Tagging practices were examined using standard informetric measures for analysis of bibliographic information and analysis of term use. Additionally, tags were compared to descriptors assigned to the same article
Indexing and retrieving images in a multilingual world
Get PDFThe Internet constitutes a vast universe of knowledge and human culture, allowing the dissemination of ideas and information without borders. The Web also became an important media for the diffusion of multilingual resources. However, linguistic differences still form a major obstacle to scientific, cultural, and educational exchange. With the ever increasing size of the Web and the availability of more and more documents in various languages, this problem becomes all the more pervasive. Besides this linguistic diversity, a multitude of databases and collections now contain documents in various formats, which may also adversely affect the retrieval process
Trade and Exchange Networks in Iron Age Cambodia: Preliminary Results from a Compositional Analysis of Glass Beads
Get PDFBeads made of glass and stone found at Iron Age period sites (500 BC – AD 500) in Southeast Asia are amongst the first signs for sustained trade and sociopolitical contact with South Asia. Because of this, they have become important artifacts for scholars wishing to better understand trade networks and sociopolitical development during this period. Using compositional analysis scholars can identify the recipes used to make these glass beads and in some cases this can be tied back to specific places or time periods. Current research indicates there were multiple glass bead production centers across South and Southeast Asia during this period. However there has not yet been a comprehensive examination of glass beads from Iron Age sites in Cambodia. This paper aims to fill this gap by presenting the results from a compositional analysis of glass beads from six Iron Age sites in Cambodia. Using a virtually non-destructive compositional technique (LA-ICP-MS), I was able to determine the presence of at least two glass bead-trading networks in Cambodia during the Iron Age
Identifying Behavioural Modernity: Lessons from Sahul
Get PDFThis contribution is aimed at drawing attention to the fact that the current most widely accepted understanding of the origins of modern behaviour is very much dominated by Western concepts of the character of humanity. Here, it is briefly discussed that this understanding not only produces less than convincing results in the current discussion on ‘modern human origins’, but it is still plagued by problems that were already evident in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is suggested that these issues are connected to a simplistic and essentialist understanding of human historical development. The concept of ‘modernity’ inevitably produces a version of human history that is unilinear, Eurocentric and concentrates on the development and history of state societies. It is therefore suggested that 'modernity' in all its versions is very much counterproductive for our aim to understand the human past and present. It needs to be replaced by an understanding of organisms, humans and their environments as mutually constituting each other and as products of their situated becoming and not of essential (cognitive and/or genetic) and time-less qualities